The Little Blue Books
in the War on Bigotry and Bunk

Mark Scott

[Photo of Haldeman-Julius
appears above the title. The explanatory paragraph below appears at the bottom
of the first column of p. 155.]

Title‑page photo: Emanuel
Haldeman‑Julius, Girard publisher, hoped his Little Blue Books would be
a "Democracy in Books," giving all Americans, especially the poor,
the opportunity for the kind of educational self‑improvement that would
one day enable them to enjoy fuller lives of individual freedom and personal
happiness. This photograph was taken in the study of his home in September,
1950.

EMANUEL HALDEMAN‑JULIUS
hoped posterity would one day remember him as the Voltaire of the English language.
Contemporaries called the Kansas publisher the "Book Baron," the "Henry
Ford of Publishing," and the "Erasmus of the Twentieth Century."
From 1919 until 1951, the Haldeman‑Julius Press of Girard, printed more
than 500,000,000 of the famous Little Blue Books in over 6,000 different titles
[1] At the time of the editor's death in July, 1951, the Haldeman‑Julius
Press published more titles and volumes than any other company in the world.
[2]

People of many nations and from
all walks of life ordered the small, inexpensive books. Charlie Chaplin and
Gloria Swanson read Little Blue Books. The Haldeman‑Julius company received
orders from as far away as China, India, the Arctic Circle, and Siam. Ethiopian
Emperor Haile Selassie's order included two crossword puzzle books, a joke book,
and What Every Married Woman Should Know, one of William John Fielding's
books on sex education [3] Little Blue Books traveled with missionaries to Africa,
India, and South America. In 1929 Adm. Richard Byrd took 1,500 Little Blue Books
with him to the South Pole. The set included Thoreau's On Walking and
Jack London's The Big Snow. [4] As recently as 1969, Norman Tanis, director
of libraries at the Kansas State College of Pittsburg, sent Little Blue Books
to accompany American astronauts on their lunar orbital mission. Although NASA
fire regulations prevented a space voyage for such selections as William Butler
Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire and Jules Verne's Is There Any
Life on the Moon? Col. Frank Borman thanked Tanis for the books, noting,
[155/156] "They are quite good, however, and make excellent reading
material right here on earth." [5] Although many people read Little Blue
Books for entertainment, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius never viewed them simply as
cheap amusement. He saw them as a way of promoting individual freedom and human
happiness by exposing the ignorance and intolerance which he thought so characteristic
of the world in general and American society in particular. "The trouble
with this world," he once complained with his usual candor, "is that
it's too full of bull." [6] And so it was during the 1920'swhen Prosecuting
Attorney William Jennings Bryan succeeded in convicting young John Scopes for
teaching evolution in Dayton, Tenn.; when Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt was
walking up and down the streets of Zenith condemning Americans of foreign birth;
when the powerful Ku Klux Klan was killing Catholics and black menit was
during these years that the Kansas publisher launched an all‑out war on
bigotry and bunk. Throughout his life, Haldeman‑Julius attacked ignorance
with both hatred and humor. "Debunking is both a serious and amusing job,"
he wrote in 1928. "It is serious, because a world run by bunk suffers inevitably
from bad management; it is amusing, because one can scarcely help laughing at
the ridiculous nature of bunk." [7]

EMANUEL HALDEMAN‑JULIUS
was born Emanuel Julius on July 30, 1889, in Philadelphia. In marrying Anna
Marcet Haldeman in June, 1916, he hyphenated his surname. Haldeman‑Julius's
parents were Ukrainian Jews who had immigrated to America in 1882 to escape
the brutal anti‑semitism of tsarist Russia.

Unfortunately, we do not know
a great deal about the Kansas publisher's childhood, as he avoided discussing
it. His first wife Marcet observed in 1924, "About his boyhood he isto
the world at largeconsistently and intentionally evasive." [8] We
do know, however, that Emanuel was the third of six children. His father, David
Julius, was a low‑paid Philadelphia bookbinder whom Emanuel once described
as a "precise craftsman who always took immense pride in his work."
[9] After meeting David Julius in 1920, Marcet remarked, "I am quite positive
it is from his father Emanuel gets his love of beautiful formats and his ability
to push aside obstacles, to believe in himself, to accept his own, instead of
others' estimates of his achievements." [10] Of his early relationship
with his father, Haldeman‑Julius once wrote:

My father and I were always
on the best kind of terms. I liked to talk with him, for I always was amused
by his dry, wry, sarcastic wit. He had the knack of disposing of great issues
with a devastating sentence or phrase. When he disliked a person he had the
actor's trick of merely repeating what the offensive individual said, with
just enough artistry in the voice to make the objectionable one ridiculous
in the eyes of all right‑minded people. [11]

Discussing his mother, Elizabeth
Zamost Julius, the publisher recalled, "My mother . . . was given to bursting
into a torrent of wordsstreams of hundreds of wordsthat would tear
a fake or piece of bunk to shreds. She hated persecution, prejudice and oppression."
[12] In fact, he declared, "I look on her as the first debunker who ever
came into my life." [13] Both Haldeman‑Julius's parents were readers,
especially his mother. We do not know their literary tastes, nor what they encouraged
their children to read. It is quite possible that the Talmud was regularly read
in the Julius home, as Emanuel's mother was descended from a long line of rabbis.
[14]

To a great extent, Haldeman‑Julius
was a self-educated man; he completed only the eighth grade and a few night‑school
courses. When he was 12, he walked into a Philadelphia secondhand bookstore
and bought two cheap pamphletsThe Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam and Oscar
Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The pamphlets cost 10 cents each.
Years later, remembering first reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol, he
recalled, "I'd been lifted out of this worldand by a 10¢ booklet.
I thought then how wonderful it would be if thousands of such booklets could
be picked up easily and [156/157] inexpensively whenever one wanted to
buy them." [15]

Books helped Haldeman‑Julius
escape from what was in fact an unhappy homelife. Discussing her husband's childhood,
Marcet noted that “as a boy he was ill‑at‑ease in his home; out
of tone with his surroundingssurroundings which breathed an essentially
old world atmosphere while he was all palpitating impatience.” [16] She further
stated, "His boyhood was full of mental and spiritual conflicts."
[17] Outside of the home, the young Haldeman‑Julius was continually persecuted
by Irish Catholic children who accused him of being a “Christ‑killer.”
[18] In fact, the reason the Kansas publisher's nose was slightly bent was that
it was once broken in a street fight with Irish Catholics.

Perhaps Haldeman‑Julius
blamed his family for the pain he suffered as a Jew. In leaving home at the
age of 15, was he trying to escape from his immigrant Jewish background? In
later years, the agnostic Kansas publisher briefly described his parents, yet
failed to mention that they were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. Indeed,
he said nothing of his own Jewish heritage. [19]

Was Haldeman‑Julius really
trying to escape the authority of parents whom he considered tyrannical? In
1922 the publisher and his wife collaborated on Dust, a novel about the
grim life of Kansas farmer Martin Wade, his wife Rose, and son Billy. As a boy,
Haldeman‑Julius was forced by his father to do “everything from carrying
coal to wiping dishes.” [20] Similarly, Billy Wade was forced by his father
to do a variety of farm chores both before and after school. In one episode
in the novel, the 15‑year‑old Billy refused to come home immediately
after school. Instead, the boy read a book at the town library, ate dinner at
a restaurant, and went to a movie. Returning home in the evening, Billy declared
independence from his mother and father in the following scene:

“Billy, dear, what did
happen?” She was beginning to feel panicky; he was courting distress.

"Nothing, mother. I just
felt like staying in the reading-room and reading"

“Oh, you had to do
some lessons, didn't you! Miss Roberts should have known better—“

"I didn't have to stay
inI wanted to."

Martin still kept silent,
his eyes looking over the newspaper wide open, staring, the muscles of his
jaw relaxed. The boy was quick to sense that he was winningthe simple,
non‑resistance of the lamb was confounding his father.

“I wanted to stay. I read
a book, and then I took a walk, and then I dropped in at the restaurant for
a bite, and then I walked around some more, and then I went to a movie.”

"Billy, what are you
saying?"

Martin, slowly putting down
his paper, remarked without stressing a syllable:

“You had better go to bed,
Bill; at once, without arguing.”

Bill moved towards the parlor,
as though to obey. At the door he stopped a moment and said: "I wasn't
arguing; I was just answering mother. She wanted to know."

"She does not want to
know."

"Then I wanted her to
know that I don't intend to work after school anymore. I'll do my chores in
the morning, but that's all. From now on nobody can make me do anything."
[21]

At the age of 15, both Emanuel
Haldeman-Julius and fictional character Billy Wade voluntarily left home to
earn their own livings. Marcet reported that her husband's visits home were
"so infrequent as to be negligible." [22] Indeed, she met David Julius
and his wife for the first time four years after her marriage to their son.

LEAVING home in 1904, Emanuel
went to New York City, and eventually got a job in Tarrytown‑on-the‑Hudson
as a bellboy at Miss Mason's School for Girls, an institution which he later
characterized as "a seminary of 400 virgins, being processed and conditioned
to become wives of New York's idle rich roués." [23] It was while working
at Miss Mason's School that Haldeman‑Julius first began serious reading.
[24] Under the guidance of the school's woman librarian (whose name he failed
to mention in later years), Emanuel wrote a number of newspaper articles on
socialist themes. [157/158]

Study at Miss Mason's School
paid off, for in 1906 Haldeman‑Julius was hired as a writer for the New
York Call, a socialist daily in New York City. The young journalist joined
the Socialist party in the same year. Shortly after beginning work with the
Call, however, he accepted a job in Milwaukee with another socialist
paper, The Daily Leader. Employed by the Leader for two years,
Emanuel wrote articles on a variety of subjects, including politics, art, literature,
and philosophy. While in Milwaukee, he worked alongside Leader writer
Carl Sandburg, whom Haldeman‑Julius considered tiresome and dull‑witted.
[25]

In 1908 Emanuel left the Daily
Leader to join the staff of the Chicago World, and later moved on
to the Citizen and the Western Comrade in Los Angeles. In July,
1914, he was rehired by his old employer the New York Call to become
its Sunday editor and drama critic. That same year the Call's senior
editor, Louis Kopelin, left New York to work on the staff of the Appeal to
Reason, a socialist newspaper in Girard. In the fall of 1915, Kopelin asked
Haldeman‑Julius to come to Girard to join the Appeal's editorial
staff.

When Emanuel joined the Appeal
to Reason, it was America's leading socialist newspaper; in 1913, it enjoyed
a circulation of over 750,000. As a young socialist, Haldeman‑Julius ardently
supported many party demands for economic reform, including the establishment
of collective ownership of the railroads and the banking system, unrestricted
suffrage for all men and women, the adoption of the graduated income tax, immediate
government relief of the unemployed by means of public works projects, and numerous
reforms involving factory legislation (the creation of the eight‑hour
workday and five‑day workweek, the establishment of unemployment insurance,
and the abolition of child labor). [26] Although Haldeman‑Julius was to
become a New Deal Democrat in the 1930's, he nevertheless retained many of the
socialist views of his youth. Apparently denying his devotion to socialism,
the Kansas publisher stated in 1928:

In my younger days I was a
Socialist journalist. I mean this in a political and something of a fanatical
sense. All young men who dream dreams are fanatics. When I was in my twenties
Socialism was a more important issue, under that name, in America than it
is now. People were interested in Socialism. It was being talked about. People
wanted to read about it. But the interest passed, Socialism waned, until now
it is really a dead issue from any bird's‑eye point of view you may
choose. [27]

Yet in 1931, two years after
the stock market crash, he was writing in Herbert HooverThe Fatuous
Failure in the White House:

The one intelligent program,
worthy of the scientific attitude which is gaining more and more respect in
the modern age, is that our large and economically essential industries should
be placed under social control; production should be fairly in harmony with
distribution; our great machines should be constantly in operation and the
people should be permitted to consume the output of these machines. There
should be reasonable, socially efficient, continuous and secure exchange of
labor. "Economic individualism" should be forgottenit is false
in theory and vicious in applicationand we should have a system of economic
common sense and collectivism. [28]

[Photograph appears
in the middle of the above quotation.]

[158/159]

WHEN Haldeman‑Julius joined
the staff of the Appeal to Reason in 1915, he moved into a setting unlike
that which he had known as a big‑city journalist. Girard, in Crawford
county, was a small town located in the southeastern corner of Kansas some 12
miles from Pittsburg and approximately the same distance from the Missouri state
line. In 1920 the Girard population was slightly over 3,000. [29] The town's
economy depended both on agriculture and mining. The opening of deep coal mines
in the 1870's encouraged laborers of diverse na-

[caption with photo]Appeal to Reason office, Girard. Kan.

tionalities to immigrate to
the county. Austrians, Germans, Englishmen, Scots, Frenchmen, and other groups
settled there. After 1900 large numbers of Italians moved into the area. In
1923 Haldeman-Julius and his wife Marcet described Crawford county in their
one‑act play Embers. Character Edward Evans, editor of a small‑town
Kansas newspaper, Says of "Fallon County":

In Fallon County, where jetty
columns of smoke pour steadily from the coal shafts and, melting into plumy
mists, float softly over the surrounding wheat fields; where the miner's rickety
shanty squats next door to the comfortable, well-built farmhouse and in the
pastures the Italians' goats graze side by side with the Holsteins of native
Kansans; where, at evening, from between splendid walls of growing corn the
farmers see the grimy miners clattering home in their little Fords; where
men from twenty countries, speaking as many languages, mingle but seldom mix‑in
the county is to be found every brand of lawlessness from simple traffic in
corn‑whiskey to the most cold-blooded Black Hand murders. [30]

How did Haldeman‑Julius,
as a transplanted Easterner, view living in Girard? He wrote in 1928:

In different sections, different
prejudices are cherished. In the East, there is a greater spirit of personal
liberty, free thought and sophistication; but there is more stress laid upon
social etiquette and what one shall wear. The reverse is true, say, in Kansas.
It has not the free attitude of the East toward one's opinions and one's amusements;
though I do not mean to imply that one cannot live freely, if one will, even
in Kansas; but what is pleasantly true of Kansas is the prevalence of a more
easy, democratic social atmosphere. [31]

On June 1, 1916, Emanuel married
Anna Marcet Haldeman, the only child of Henry Winfield and Alice Addams Haldeman.
Her father, a wealthy Girard banker, was educated as a physician at the University
of Leipzig. Her mother was a sister of the renowned Jane Addams of Chicago's
Hull House. At the age of 15, Marcet went east to boarding school, was graduated
from Bryn Mawr in 1909, and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts
in New York. From 1910 to 1913 she acted in stock companies in the United States
and Canada under the name of Jean Marcet. With the death of her parents, she
left the stage to take over the family bank, the oldest bank in Crawford county.

Marcet was a "modern woman."
She was a bank president, edited "The Bulletin" of the Kansas Bankers'
Association in 1916 and 1917, and smoked cigarettes in a day when it was socially
unacceptable for women to smoke. According to Marcet, her belief in female equality
was the reason she and her husband hyphenated their surnames. She explained
in 1924, "On Emanuel's part the addition of my name to his own was purely
a response to an earnest wish of mine; a generous gesture acknowledging our
full partnership." [32] [159/160]

According to Gene DeGruson,
curator of the "Haldeman‑Julius Collection" at Pittsburg State
University, it was Jane Addams who really wanted the surnames hyphenated. Jane
was closely related to the Haldeman family; Henry Haldeman was not only her
brother‑in‑law, but her cousin as well. Moreover, she regarded Marcet
as her favorite niece. DeGruson notes that correspondence from Jane to her sister
Alice Haldeman indicates that "Aunt Jane" did not want the "much‑loved"
Haldeman name lost in marriage. [33]

Whether Jane Addams was in fact
the prime cause of the hyphenated surname, it cannot be denied that she exerted
a remarkable influence in Girard. It was at her insistence that the Girard Public
Library was founded in the 1890's. In 1915 Marcet established a miniature Hull
House for miners' children at Radley, a small town east of Girard. Her purpose
in providing baseball diamonds and holding dances at the house was to keep the
children out of the local pool halls.

In 1919 Marcet provided her
husband the funds to buy out the Appeal to Reason. Although the Appeal
was soon renamed the Haldeman‑Julius Weekly, the newspaper
was “still socialistic, still on the fringe, but with a bit of Menckenism thrown
in.” [34] Although Haldeman‑Julius admired H. L. Mencken's skill as a
debunker, he thought one of Mencken's major failings was that the Baltimore
editor basically "hated people." [35]

Marcet had more than a financial
interest in this publishing venture. Besides the play Embers and the
novel, Dust, she and her husband collaborated on another novel, Violence
(1929). Both novels were translated into Russian. In addition, Marcet wrote
several Little Blue Books of her own, including What the Editor's Wife Is
Thinking About (1924), Why I Believe in Companionate Marriage (1927),
The Story of a Lynching (1927), and Famous and Interesting Guests
at a Kansas Farm (1936). She wrote articles for such magazines as the Atlantic
Monthly, and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1931 to report on the progress
of the Russian Revolution for one of her husband's many publications, the American
Freeman.

In addition to her professional
career, Marcet cared for her daughter Alice, son Henry, and foster daughter
Josephine. In fact, Marcet taught school for her own children as well as those
of her neighbors at the Haldeman‑Julius home, a 160‑acre farm situated
on the outskirts of Girard. A 1921 account described the nursery‑school
atmosphere of the home in the following manner:

Our farm is a jolly place
with a cabin for the colored help, a bunk house for the two men who help on
the farm. A little play house, slipper[y] slide and stream for the children,
and best of all, in the winter, in the sunny nursery, a Montessori school
to which the youngsters of the neighborhood come and which I teach myself.
We have lots of dogsat present six and five puppies, ducks, geese, turkeys,
and guineas and have just bought a setting of peafowl eggs. The little calves,
colts and pigs arrived in a delightfully exciting succession and it always
amuses us when we realize that we get more when we sell a calf than when we
sell a story. [36]

THE ACQUISITION of the Appeal
to Reason in 1919 gave the Haldeman‑Juliuses their own literary means
of espousing what they believed was man's and woman's natural desire for personal
freedom and happiness. "We are sure that freedom is the only hope for civilization,"
the publisher once wrote. "Only when the intellect of man is free can there
be enlightenment and progress." [37] The Haldeman-Juliuses strongly believed
in the liberty of all people, regardless of color, creed, or sex. Both believed
that women had the right to an independent existence outside of marriage and
the family.

The publisher and his wife continually
fought against illiberalism, which they viewed as "the disposition of narrowness
and ill will that impels man to interfere unfairly, officiously, mischievously
with the lives of his fellow men." [38] Opposing censorship, they affirmed
the right of individuals to read whatever they desired. Indeed, the Haldeman‑Juliuses
maintained that freedom of thought and rational inquiry were essential to human
happiness. The Kansas editor declared in 1929:

Science and industrialismmaterialism in all its manifestations, vastly
accelerated and elaboratedhave made the new world that we live in. It
is a happier world, a healthier world, a more confident and energetic and
questing world, a world that knows more of beauty and leisure and joy, and
that is learning moreand learning it rationallyof culture. [39]

The Haldeman‑Juliuses
believed the major enemies of human happiness were "unreasonable"
authority and superstition. In Why I Believe in Freedom of Thought (1930),
the Girard publisher stated, "History impressively shows us the dangers
of authority and superstition. It is by observing and reasoning and building
carefully upon the facts of life that man progresses in civilized aims."
[40] The following year he wrote, "What a terrible world in which the solemn
face of authority no longer has its onetime awesome influence but instead provokes
a smile or the swift, ringing laughter of derision!" [41]

Haldeman‑Julius remarked
in 1925 in Brief Burlesques and Epigrams, "We have gone through
the Ice Age, the Stone Age, the Iron Age, and now we are in the Bone‑Head
Age." [42] In the publisher's opinion, bunk typified the "Bone‑Head
Age." He believed that by encouraging mankind to be ignorant and irrational,
bunk was a primary obstacle to personal freedom and human happiness. As "unreasonable"
authority pretending to represent truth and "goodness," bunk took
a variety of forms. It often encouraged men to resort to violence rather than
to resolve problems rationally. According to Haldeman‑Julius, such "bunkist"
doctrines as racial supremacy, patriotism, and religious superiority sought
to "wring the heart, flush the cheek and moisten the eye; or, again, to
set hearts afire, as the saying goes, to inspire clenched fists and flashing
eyes; or, again, to induce an emotion of lazy surrender to what seems easy of
belief because so many seem to believe it. . . ." [43]

The editor noted that bunk never
appealed to the people's intelligence, but actually encouraged their provincialism
and mediocrity. For example, he regarded motion pictures as "a tremendous
force in holding down the American mind to the level of the obvious, cheap,
superficial and essentially unimaginative." [44] Through its emotional
appeal to tradition and the "Faith of Our Fathers," bunk sought "to
sanction and support the continuance of human folly." [45] Haldeman‑Julius
noted that in commenting on geological investigation at the 1925 Scopes trial,
Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan proudly declared that it was "better
to study the 'Rock of Ages' than to study the age of rocks." [46]

The Kansas publisher pointed
out that bunk tried to satisfy “dull minds,” was hostile to rational inquiry
in any form, and, like Christianity, always threatened certain catastrophe if
the thinking man rejected it. Based on emotional falsehood rather than rational
truth, the "lurid prophecies of a debunked world" always asked such
ominous questions as "What would a town be without churches?" or "How
can we expect the world to go anywhere but to the devil when young people are
so presumptuous, so poor in reverence, so perversely prone to disobedience in
throwing overboard the ideas of their parents, their teachers, their preachers
and daring to choose for themselves a philosophy of life?" [47]

In advocating rationality and
intellectual freedom, Haldeman‑Julius mercilessly ridiculed those ignorance‑mongers
whom he thought "worshipped at the Temple of Bunk." Certainly, the
Girard editor did not hesitate to single out prominent Americans whom he considered
purveyors of bunk, including:

Warren Harding

..........

an example of "fat‑headed American mediocrity."

Calvin Coolidge

..........

an example of "thin‑headed American mediocrity."

Herbert Hoover

..........

“the fatuous failure in the White House.”

Henry Ford

..........

a man whose "opinion, on any really thoughtful
subject of life, is worth less than the opinion of many a studious,
well‑read, bright mechanic in a Ford plant."

[161/162]

Will Rogers

..........

“a buffoon, who has lately emerged as actually incredibly
a guide to the American people on subjects of politics, international
relations, economics, morality and what‑not.”

Haldeman‑Julius's close
friend Clarence Darrow once asked him, "If you take the bunk out of people,
what have you left?" [49] The Kansas publisher admitted that the American
public, preoccupied with amusement, had barely reached intellectual puberty.
He noted, "'Let's have fun,' cry our boys and girls, our Babbitts and Rotarians,
our Ku Kluxers and Masons, our Sewing Circles and Ladies' Aiders." [50]
Haldeman‑Julius reported in 1923, "The people are children. O[u]r
average intelligence registers about thirteen years." [51] Indeed, he believed
this low educational level made the American people particularly vulnerable
to bunk, and thereby they promoted their own unhappiness. In 1917, he noted,
bunk had enlisted American doughboys in a war to "make the world safe for
democracy." Bunk fomented racial and religious strife. "Unreasonable"
laws denied Americans the right to control their own lives. Censorship laws
told them what they were not permitted to read. The prohibition amendment told
them what they could not drink. Federal and state laws demanded severe punishment
for persons found guilty of distributing literature specifically describing
various methods of birth control. In short, Haldeman‑Julius believed the
American people's unquestioned obedience to "bunkist" authority had
made countless lives miserable.

Yet even though the Girard publisher
stated that "the people are children," he added, "It is not as
hopeless as it seems." [52] Haldeman-Julius believed that if the educational
level of the American public were raised, the people would begin to question
what he considered unreasonable authority, would achieve greater personal freedom,
and ultimately become happier. In fact, he was convinced that the America of
the 1920's, embarrassed by its own ignorance, really wanted to be enlightened.
As he explained in America: The Greatest Show on Earth (1928):

Philosophies, religions, literatures,
foreign customs and views of government that were scarcely namesif they
were thatbefore the World War, now arouse curiosity and are made familiar
in a flood of books; more attention is given to foreign news; Americans are
beginning, here and there in growing groups, to regard themselves as in some
sort citizens of the world. They are becoming more intelligently sensitive.
They care more about the good opinion of the world. They do not wish to appear
foolish, and many who were not intellectuals, who had no deep convictions
about the issue, were ashamed of the ludicrous show of ignorance and bigotry
in Dayton, Tennessee. [53]

"If American readers had
been so shackled still that they would not read Thomas Paine and his sympathizers,"
the Kansas editor stated in 1928, "I might never have begun the Little
Blue Books in the first place. I might have turned to the manufacture of chewing
gum, or something equally free from intellectual dynamite." [54]

THE HALDEMAN‑JULIUS Press
published a variety of periodicals, including the Haldeman‑Julius
Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly, the American Freeman,
the Debunker, the Militant Atheist, and Lives and Letters.
Shortly after buying out the Appeal to Reason in 1919, Haldeman‑Julius
published as his first two Little Blue Books literature he had [162/163]

Haldeman‑Julius established
Little Blue Book shops in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Venice,
Colo., but most customers bought their books directly from the Girard plant,
responding to such advertisements as this which appeared in national magazines
and big city newspapers.

[164] once bought as
a boy in Philadelphia bookstoreThe Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam and
Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The title of the book series
varied, from the Appeal to Reason Pocket Series, the People's Pocket Series,
and the Ten Cent Pocket Series. In 1924 the short publications were renamed
the Little Blue Books. The covers of the early books were blue, their size three
and one‑half by five inches, and their average length 64 pages.

Haldeman‑Julius recalled
in later years,

I thought that it might be
possible to put books within the reach of everyone, rich or poor, though mostly
poorbooks that they would want, and which they would choose for the
sake of the books alone. By that I mean that I dreamed of publishing in such
quantities that I could sell them at a price which would put all books on
the same cost level. [55]

The first two Little Blue Books
were offered to the subscribers of the Appeal to Reason at a cost of
250 apiece. The books later sold at a price of five for a dollar, 10 cents,
five cents, and by 1942 for as low as two and one‑half cents (a limited
offer). By the end of the 1920's, the Girard publisher could rightfully claim
that his business was, indeed, the "Democracy in Books." Yet why were
they so popular? Haldeman‑Julius explained in 1923:

The success of the little
blue books in the five‑cent Pocket Series has proved the aptitude of
the workers for the classics. The reason is apparent. Here are books that
are so cheap that the poorest worker can afford to buy them; they are short,
so that he can easily spare the time to read them; they are convenient in
size, so that he can carry them in his pocket to be read on the way to work,
during the lunch hour, any time that he has a few minutes unoccupied. [56]

By 1923 Little Blue Books were
sold in 500 different titles. That same year, English novelist and essayist
John Cowper Powys, himself an author of 10 Little Blue Books, wrote, "The
genuine popularization of excellent literature has now emerged from the heart
of Kansas as an established fact." [57] Little Blue Books were advertised
under such headings as “IMPROVE YOURSELF!” in the New York Times Book Review,
Life, Harper's, Liberty, the Chicago Tribune, and
The Nation. Haldeman-Julius established Little Blue Book shops in Cincinnati,
Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Venice, Colo. Most customers, however, bought
their Little Blue Books directly from the Girard plant. By 1928 orders were
coming into Girard at a summer average of 2,500 a day, a winter average of 4,000.

Many prominent literary figures
wrote Little Blue Books. Anna Louise Strong was the author of a special set
on life in the Soviet Union. Marcet Haldeman‑Julius once recalled the
time Anna Louise came to Girard and enthusiastically reported on the greatness
of Soviet Commissar Leon Trotsky. [58] Margaret Sanger wrote Little Blue Books
on sex education. Upton Sinclair, author of 10 volumes of the books, noted in
his autobiography that the Haldeman‑Julius six‑part publication
of The Jungle significantly contributed to the book's mass popularity.
Will Durant wrote for the Kansas publisher. Years after the editor's death,
Durant stated, "I owe Haldeman‑Julius a great deal, for it was at
his urging that I wrote the 'Story of Philosophy.' He was a generous spirit
and a stimulating mind." [59] Little Blue Books included essays by Clarence
Darrow, Luther Burbank, W.E.B. Du Bois, Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Frank
Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and many others.

IN The First Hundred Million
(1928), Haldeman‑Julius examined Little Blue Book sales for the 12
months of 1927. Based on an analysis of 1,156 randomly selected orders representing
sales of 25,000 Books, the publisher came to some interesting conclusions concerning
Little Blue Book customers and their literary tastes. Although Haldeman‑Julius
did not indicate from what geographical areas the orders came, he noted that
70 percent of his readers were male, 30 percent female. The orders analyzed
represented customers of all ages, with a majority in their 20's and 30's. [60]
Significantly, Haldeman‑Julius's estimates of annual sales for 1927 showed
that the most popular Little Blue Books were those dealing with sex and love,
including:

Prostitution in the Modern World

..........

129,500

What Married Women Should Know

..........

112,000

What Married Men Should Know

..........

97,500

Woman's Sexual Life

..........

97,000

[164/165]

What Every Young Man Should Know

..........

95,000

What Every Young Woman Should Know

..........

90,000

Prostitution in the Ancient World

..........

84,500

Man's Sexual Life

..........

78,500

Prostitution in the Medieval World

..........

73,000

What Every Girl Should Know

..........

66,000

The Physiology of Sex Life

..........

65,500

Catholicism and Sex

..........

65,000

The Common Sense of Sex

..........

63,000

Freud on Sleep and Sexual Dreams

..........

61,000

The Art of Kissing

..........

60,500

Sex Life in Greece and Rome

..........

56,000

Homosexual Life

..........

54,500

How to Love

..........

52,500

Mistresses of Today

..........

52,500

Womanhood: Facts of Life for Women

..........

52,500

[61]

Haldeman‑Julius remarked, "American readers, it seems, are not afraid
of sex. They recognize it is a fact, and they want to know more facts about
it." [62] Yet the readers of Little Blue Books wanted knowledge on a variety
of other topics as well. In the spirit of free thought, the agnostic publisher
printed numerous Little Blue Books which treated religion favorably, such as:

In 1927 the Haldeman‑Julius
company sold an estimated 50,000 copies of the first volume in the Little Blue
Book series, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam. Other popular literary works
included:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson)

.........

29,500

The Man Without a Country (Hale)

.........

27,500

Voyage to the Moon (Verne)

.........

19,000

Autobiography of Cellini

.........

18,500

Confessions of an Opium‑Eater
(DeQuincey)

.........

17,500

Diary of Samuel Pepys

.........

17,500

The Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan)

.........

17,000

Aesop's Famous Fables

.........

16,000

Poor Richard's Almanac

.........

14,500

Andersen's Famous Fairy Tales

.........

13,500

[65]

Haldeman‑Julius published
a variety of books on philosophy, such as:

Story of Friedrich Nietzsche's
Philosophy

.........

45,000

Story of Plato's Philosophy

.........

39,000

Story of Anatole France and
His Philosophy

.........

32,000

Story of Aristotle's Philosophy

.........

27,000

Story of Arthur Schopenhauer's
Philosophy

.........

26,500

Story of Baruch Spinoza's Philosophy

.........

25,500

Story of Francis Bacon's Philosophy

.........

25,500

Story of Voltaire's Philosophy

.........

24,000

Story of Herbert Spencer's
Philosophy

.........

19,000

[66]

Biographies in the Little Blue Book series included:

Thomas Paine

.........

21,000

Oscar Wilde

.........

19,000

Napoleon Bonaparte

.........

17,500

Abraham Lincoln

.........

13,500

Leo Tolstoy

.........

12,000

Machiavelli

.........

7,000

Benjamin Disraeli

.........

6,500

Thomas Paine (A second biography)

.........

6,000

Michelangelo

.........

5,000

Frederick the Great

.........

4,000

Thomas Jefferson

.........

4,000

[67]

Comparing the Haldeman‑Julius sales figures for the biographies of Paine
and Jefferson, one book reviewer declared in November, 1928, "When the
story of the immortal Jefferson is only one fifth as interesting to the plain
common people as the life of a man whose chief claim to fame seems to be religious
infidelitywell, it indicates parlous times for Democracy." [68]

On the subject of music, Haldeman‑Julius printed Facts You Should
Know About Music (37,000), Old Favorite Negro Songs (15,000),
and Great Christian Hymns (3,000). Little Blue Books on language
skills included Common Faults in English (47,000) and Esperanto
Self Taught (17,000). The Haldeman‑Julius company published a
variety of "how‑to" books, such as How To Make All Kinds
of Candy [165/166] (45,000), How To Psycho‑Analyze Yourself
(43,000), and How To Tie All Kinds of Knots (27,500). Haldeman-Julius
published cook books, joke books, essays on evolution, ghost stories, proverbs,
and epigrams.

How did the publisher determine what works should be included in the Little
Blue Book series? He once explained:

As editor and publisher, I've always known my public intimatelyit's
myself. I judge a manuscript by only one standarddo I like it? If I
find it interesting and readable, I print it. I'm Mr. PublicE.H.J.,
multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. [69]

A list of Haldeman‑Julius's favorite writers generally corresponded
to the best sellers in the Little Blue Book series. The editor's books on
agnosticism, reflecting many of his own skeptical views, far outsold those
selections expressing religious belief. Haldeman‑Julius admired the
views of Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Voltaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and
Arthur Schopenhauer concerning the freedom of individuals from coercive
authority. He believed "good" literature included the works of
such writers as Boccaccio, Gautier, Maupassant, and Shakespeare.

The Kansas publisher wrote in 1928, "Whatever readers have expressed
a desire for, I have given themsaving only what I consider trash."
[70] He stated that even if the works of Cotton Mather would sell well,
he would not include them in the Little Blue Book series. "I would
not do ‘anything for money’," Haldeman‑Julius once wrote. "I
am glad that my profits have not come from the manufacture of munitions
of war, for example. I am glad, in other words, that I have been able to
use good business toward the improvement instead of the exploitation of
the masses." [71] Reconsidering several profitable Little Blue Books
on self‑improvement which gave "a rosy glow to the daily humdrum
of life," the editor removed them from publication. Emphasizing that
the publishing policy of the Haldeman‑Julius company was "truth‑telling,
sham‑smashing, and . . . debunking," he noted, "These books
were liars. They played falsely upon the imagination." [72]

Haldeman‑Julius declared in the early 1920's, "I am not selling
complexions, nor am I selling sleep. I am trying to 'sell' the people on
reading, on knowledge, on culture. It can be done." [73] If a Little
Blue Book was not selling well, and the publisher personally considered
it "good" literature, he often simply changed its title. "If
by altering a title here and there a good book would be more widely read,"
he stated in 1928, "then the end certainly would justify the means."
[74] Because he believed the American public was primarily interested in
having fun, he found it advantageous to suggest "fun" in Little
Blue Book titles. For example, when Guy de Maupassant's The Tallow Ball
was selling only at a few thousand copies a year, Haldeman‑Julius
changed its title to A French Prostitute's Sacrifice, resulting in
sales increases of over 50,000. Similarly, he changed Moliere's The Bourgeois
Gentilhomme to The Show‑Off, Gautier's Fleece of Gold
to The Quest for a Blonde Mistress, Hugo's The King Enjoys
Himself to The Lustful King Enjoys Himself, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius's
What the Editor's Wife Is Thinking About to Marcet Haldeman‑Julius's
Intimate Notes on Her Husband. All of these title changes resulted in
remarkable sales increases. Critics accused Haldeman‑Julius of deceptive
sales practices. He answered that he was merely trying to popularize what
he viewed as good literature. Certainly some readers were deceived, but
not always by Haldeman-Julius title changes. Consider the many devotees
of the supernatural who bought Henrick Ibsen's Ghosts only to find
that the play was about a young man dying of syphilis.

Commenting on the Haldeman‑Julius practice of title-changing, a writer
for the Kansas City Star observed in August, 1951, "False advertising?
But, on the whole, these were books of considerable merit which probably
would never have been ordered had the buyer known their content. And, as
the pulp‑story mind accepted the Harvard Classics, some knowledge
had to rub off." [75] According to Kansas journalist Walter Green,
"Many people in the 20's and 30's got a large part of their education
from the Little Blue Books, and many a fellow in college used the E. H.‑J.
translation of the classics as ‘ponies’ to ride [166/167] along with
Caesar, Virgil and Homer." [76] In fact, by the end of the 1920's the
Little Blue Books bore the following slogan on their back covers: "Little
Blue BooksA University in Print Read the World Over."

Yet it was oftentimes a university preaching what were frequently considered
radical, if not downright immoral, causes. For those readers unsure of the
publisher's own position on specific issues, Haldeman‑Julius obliged
by writing his own set of Little Blue Books. Like many of the volumes in
the series, the Little Blue Books written by the editor protested against
all forms of what he regarded as unreasonable authority. "Forms of
compulsion are abhorrent to the liberal mind," he wrote in the spirit
of John Stuart Mill in What Is a Liberal? (1930), "and they
can only be tolerated on the grounds of absolute, plain necessity."
[77] (Although Haldeman-Julius did not specifically refer to Mill in this
Little Blue Book, the editor was nevertheless quite familiar with the British
philosopher's views on personal freedom; the first Big Blue Book, published
on August 18, 1925, was Mill's On Liberty.)

LIKE Friedrich Nietzsche, Haldeman-Julius believed that man's unquestioned
obedience to Judeo-Christian authority had caused humanity much unhappiness.
He wrote in 1925, "The Bible has done more harm to the human mind and
character than all other vicious books combined." [78] In The Age‑Old
Follies of Man (1930), he declared:

We regularly hear it said that poverty, pain, misfortune and the like are
manifestations of God's will; that the true Christian must bear such sufferings
with fortitude and even with thankfulness; that God has mysterious purposes
in view which it is not the business of man to question. If this is not superstition,
what is it possibly to be called? It is grotesquely out of line with a civilized
viewpoint. It has not a shadow of reason to dignify it. It is not even a bit
of clever and entertaining error. It is sheer superstition, childish, ridiculous,
primitive. [79]

In Haldeman‑Julius's opinion, theology “takes our stupidity and tries
to organize it into a system of thought, which is to multiply stupidity."
[80] He believed the teachings of the Roman church were "utterly antagonistic
to the great features of liberalism and humanism which set the modern age
brilliantly above the Dark Ages when Catholic faith and dogma and power
were supreme." [81] The publisher declared in The Danger of Catholicism
to the Public Schools (1930):

"No surrender to intelligence" is the cry of the Roman Catholic
Church to the modern world. "No return to ignorance and superstition,
no compromise of modernism and medievalism," should be our repeated slogan
and our repeated, intelligent inspiration to a full program of truth-telling
in reply to the lying claims and pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church."
[82]

Although Nietzsche despised Judeo‑Christian thought, he did not hate
Christians and Jews. Similarly Haldeman‑Julius, a bitter foe of Roman
Catholicism, did not hate Catholics as people; two of his best friends in
Girard were priests. While the publisher did not single out priests for
ridicule, he mercilessly assailed Protestant "pulpit pounders"
and "hidebound old sin‑killers" whom he thought enriched
themselves by shamelessly promoting intolerance, ignorance, superstition,
unquestioned obedience to authority, and human unhappiness. He particularly
relished debunking hypocritical evangelists, those “salesmen of salvation”
who had "put pep into Saint Paul and jazzed Jesus." [83] In Is
"Knowledge" of God a Delusion? (1931), the editor noted, "Our
civilization is materialistic, says the preacher. He hastens to add that
our materialistic civilization will crash unless he, the preacher, has a
satisfactory share in this materialism." [84] The publisher thought
Christian Scientists had "no rivals in the medieval style of spiritual
magic." [85] Of Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, the editor stated,
"No yokel could hate and fear an idea more fervently than Bryan."
[86]

Haldeman‑Julius's condemnation of Christianity was just one manifestation
of his general hatred of intolerant and "unreasonable" authority.
As a boy in Philadelphia, Emanuel Julius had been beaten up by Catholics
for [167/168] being a "Christ‑killer." At the age
of 15, he left home, apparently to escape the authoritarian old‑world
traditions of his immigrant Jewish family. The rebellious Haldeman‑Julius
fought "unreasonable" authority because it had caused him great
personal unhappiness. He believed that religious authority had similarly
caused mankind misery. As the Kansas publisher declared in 1931:

We attack religion because religion is not truebecause religion is
an obstacle (or set of obstacles) in the way of progressbecause religion
is the breeding ground of intolerancebecause, in short, religion is
essentially hostile to mankind. [87]

It is important to understand Haldeman-Julius's views on the evils of religious
authority, for he thought that religious intolerance was responsible for
many of America's ills. The Girard publisher claimed that religious sanctions
against divorce and birth control made numerous American lives needlessly
unhappy. The Roman church's prohibition against contraceptives was, he maintained,
oppressive to those Catholic women who wanted to limit family size, or who
did not want any children at all. "The Pope is qualified to tell the
modern world nothing," Haldeman‑Julius wrote in 1930, "and
he is qualified to tell us less than nothing about sex." [88]

THE KANSAS editor believed that Americans trapped by unhappy marriages
should seek divorces, an extremely controversial position in the 1920's.
In fact, he and his wife Marcet even persuaded several unhappy Girard couples
to get divorces. Certainly, neither one of the Haldeman‑Juliuses glorified
traditional matrimony. The editor dubbed it "double entry bookkeeping."
[89] His wife, moreover, scandalized Kansas as well as the rest of the country
by advocating "companionate marriage." Marcet believed that American
society, by approving of sexual relations only within the bounds of traditional
marriage, unfairly denied young people what she and her husband believed
was their right to sexual experience. Furthermore, she thought that numerous
laws denying young Americans access to contraceptive devices made their
lives miserable. While admitting that many young people were not yet ready
to assume the responsibilities of family life, Marcet affirmed that they
were nevertheless biologically and emotionally prepared for a sexual relationship.

Marcet did not advocate “free love,” but rather “companionate marriage”
as a means of liberating America's youth from oppressive sexual restrictions.
She noted that a companionate marriage was a legal union “the object of
which is sexual and social companionship.” [90] The success of the marriage
was based in large part on a companionate couple's effective use of birth
control. If a child were born, however, Marcet stressed that the companionate
marriage would automatically become a traditional “family marriage.”

Denver Juvenile Court judge Ben B. Lindsey had stated that “a union childless
by agreement until compatibility is proved, is a companionate marriage.
So long as there are no children and the couple mutually desire a divorce,
they may obtain it on simple declaration. It is not a trial marriage, which
involves no ceremony.” [91] In a companionate marriage, Marcet pointed out,
neither spouse assumed full financial responsibility; each was “independent”
in marriage. If they were college students, they could continue to receive
support from their parents until the time of graduation. Should a couple
decide to dissolve their companionate marriage by divorce, the husband would
not be penalized with alimony payments as punishment “for the mutual mistake
of his wife and himself.” [92]

On November 27, 1927, Unitarian Minister L. M. Birkhead presided at the
companionate marriage of Marcet's foster daughter Josephine to Kansas University
student Aubrey Roselle. Josephine told a news reporter at the time of the
ceremony that she and her new husband planned to practice birth control
and maintain financial independence of each other. [93]

The companionate marriage issue became a cause célèbre, and although
its main proponent was Marcet Haldeman‑Julius, her husband's enemies
did not hesitate to capitalize on it. Fearing that the Girard publisher
might run [168/169]

When Emanuel Julius (1889‑1951) and Anna Marcet Haldeman (1888‑1941)
were married in 1916, they hyphenated their surnames. Marcet was a "modern
woman" who believed in female equality, and combining their names was
an acknowledgment of their full partnership. Photograph reproduced from
the Kansas City Post, August 22, 1927.

for either lieutenant governor or United States senator in the general
election of 1930, and dreading the radical effect he would undoubtedly have
on state politics, a group of five Kansas newspaper editors, including William
Allen White, sought to discredit Haldeman-Julius through widespread news
coverage of his foster daughter's companionate marriage. Consequently, reports
of Josephine's wedding appeared on the front pages of Kansas newspapers,
as well as those in New York, San Francisco, and other major American cities.
[94] The publicity did succeed in arousing some public indignation. Rev.
John W. Bradbury of Kansas City's Bales Baptist church declared at the time
of Josephine's wedding, "I regard such men as Ben B. Lindsey, E. Haldeman-Julius
and the Rev. L. M. Birkhead as fostering a human relationship unsanctioned
by God and infamously degrading to the participants." [95]

Institutional religion had good cause to condemn the Haldeman‑Juliuses,
as the publisher and his wife continually opposed those restrictive American
laws which they thought were examples of "intolerant Christian legislation."
Both advocated the repeal of laws which denied Americans sex education.
Marcet asked her readers in 1927, "Do you realize that at the present
it is a crime in America for a mother to write a letter telling her daughter
how to postpone the advent of her first child?" [96] United States
postal laws declared that any American mailing an "article or thing
designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion"
would, upon conviction, "be fined not more than five thousand dollars
or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." [97] Commenting on
the laws denying women access to any specific information on birth control
Marcet stated:

What puzzles me is why the laws against contraceptive information are allowed
to stand. For usually women get whatever they make up their minds they are
entitled to have. And if there is anything a woman has a right to demand surely
it is information which is strictly her own personal concern and about her
own body. [98]

In order to satisfy American postal authorities, Haldeman‑Julius
had to be extremely cautious that Little Blue Book titles were not “obscene,
lewd, lascivious, or filthy.” [99] As Marcet noted, American laws prevented
him from publishing explicit information on contraception. Certainly, the
Girard editor had numerous problems with censors. In the 1920's, the Canadian
government, considering many of the Little Blue Books on sexual topics to
be "disguised obscenity," refused to allow their importation into
the country. In response to critics who claimed that Little Blue Books would
have a corrupting influence on the sexual attitudes of American Womanhood,
Haldeman‑Julius quoted New York Mayor Jimmy Walker's view, "Did
you ever know a woman [169/170] who was ruined by a book?" [100]
As for the literary expertise of censors, those guardians of public morality,
Haldeman‑Julius remarked, "To offer literature to their judgment
is to cast pearls before swine." [101] Yet the Kansas publisher predicted
in 1928:

American readers are thorough in their quest for knowledge. I have demonstrated
that. They place no taboos of their own on anything which may inform them,
or help them to understand the world and themselves. One of these days Mr.
Average Man may resent being deprived of a book he wants to read, just because
some self‑styled Superior Man says it won't be good for him. When that
time comes, the desire for knowledge will at last have its way: Its full,
undenied, unhindered way. [102]

IN 1927 Haldeman‑Julius joined Clarence Darrow, Sinclair Lewis, and
others in condemning the many "blue laws" which existed throughout
the United States. The Kansas publisher thought the legal prohibition of
such activities as Sunday baseball and Sunday motion picture shows was an
excellent case of "intolerant Christian legislation." Viewing
the “ordeal of Prohibition” in the same manner, he declared in 1931:

The law is a product of moral and religious intolerance; it is one of the
most brazen and pernicious examples of tyranny ever contrived by a political
machine in any age. Prohibition has made farcical, false play on the notion
of democracy. [103]

Emanuel Haldeman‑Julius took great pains to ridicule those many legal
restrictions which, like prohibition, represented "unreasonable"
authority. In his Little Blue Book entitled Facing Life Realistically
(1931), the publisher cited numerous examples: in Buffalo, N.Y., it
was illegal for a patron to keep a milk bottle for more than 24 hours; in
Minnesota, it was illegal for couples to dance in dimly lit public halls;
in Corvallis, Ore., it was illegal for young women to drink coffee at evening
meals, except on Friday and Saturday; and in Michigan, it was illegal for
a girl to wear a fraternity pin. [104]

ONE COULD be easily amused by the editor's list of "stupid laws."
Many people, however, did not appreciate his stinging con-

[Photo appears above caption below.]

Haldeman‑Julius believed in well informed men and opposed those who
sought to stifle freedom of speech and the press. At the time of his death
in July, 1951, the Haldeman‑Julius Co. published at its Girard print
shop more titles and volumes than any other company in the world. [170/171]

demnations of the legal and social sanctions directed against the American
Negro. "There is no mystery about the prejudice and injustice that
usually distorts all reference to the Negro," he declared in 1928.
"As an issue of right, and as an issue of expediency, the only sensible
attitude toward the Negro is a fair and human and kindly attitude. Discrimination
is indefensible." [105]

Haldeman‑Julius was one of the first publishers to print an anthology
of American Negro poetry. [106] He corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois and
James Weldon Johnson, and discussed their views on civil rights before black
church congregations in Kansas City and nearby Pittsburg. What did he see
as the final solution to America's race problem? He suggested in 1928:

I am coming to believe that the only way to settle this Negro question is
by the gradual process of amalgamation; let the colors merge to form a new
race. We see already that the lighter the skin, the lighter the prejudice.
[107]

The Girard publisher's position on the race issue was especially courageous
in view of the power of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization which, by the
mid‑1920's, exerted considerable influence not only in Crawford county,
but throughout the state of Kansas. By 1923 Kansas Klansmen were chanting
such lines as.

I would rather be a Ku Klux Klan with a robe of snowy white,
Than to be a Roman Katholic with a robe as black as night,
A KKK is American, America is his home,
While a Katholic owes allegiance to a Dago pope in Rome. [108]

In 1924 both Republican and Democratic nominees for governor enjoyed Klan
support; the mayor of Emporia, home of William Allen White, was a Klan member.
Editor White, protesting Klan influence in the 1924 gubernatorial election,
ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for governor. Announcing
his candidacy on September 20, 1924, he declared:

The issue in Kansas this year is the Ku Klux Klan above everything else.
It is found in nearly every county. It represents a small minority of the
citizenship and it is organized for purposes of terror, directed at honest
law-abiding citizens; Negroes, Jews, and Catholics. These

[Photo appears above caption below.]

Clerical workers at the Girard print shop processed mail orders for Little
Blue Books which by 1928 were coming into the company at a summer average of
2,500 a day, a winter average of 4,000. Contemporaries called Haldeman‑Julius
the "Henry Ford of Publishing." [171/172]

groups in Kansas comprise more than one‑fourth of our population. They
menace no one. Yet, because of their skin, their race, or their creed, the
Ku Klux Klan is subjecting them to economic boycott, to social ostracism,
to every form of harassment, annoyance and terror that a bigoted minority
can use. [109]

Emanuel Haldeman‑Julius, viewing the Klan as "a jazzing‑up
of the very old bunk of racial animosity and patriotism," [110] wrote
from Girard that same year:

Never in American history has anything been known to even compare with the
present black wave of bigotry and reaction, personified so completely by the
Ku Klux Klan. . . . The ignorance of the masses makes it almost easy for the
power of religious hatred to "sell" the idea of dissension and lawlessness.
. . . Bigotry will grow just so long as there is man's mass ignorance to heed
these hoodlums, and as there is a vast amount of it one shudders at the prospect.
[111]

Catholic John McPike Keresey stated at the time in one of the Haldeman‑Julius
Little Blue Books:

Catholics, as citizens, condemn the Klan, as they would condemn any other
corrupt, lawless, disloyal and disintegrating influence in American life.
The murder of Father Coyle at Birmingham, Alabama, the burning of churches,
the raiding of homes, and the whipping of defenseless men and womensuch
acts passing unpunished, create anxiety in our minds regarding the integrity
of those who administer the affairs of the incriminated States. [112]

Commenting on the Klan's orgy of religious persecution and racial brutality,
Haldeman-Julius wrote in 1923:

We are a barbarous people. We send missionaries to the "heathen"harmless,
gentle foreigners who are better off without us. And at home we burn Negroes
at the stake, hound Catholics and Jews through bigoted and sadistic Ku Klux
Klans, fan into flame hatred and dissension, and then cover it all with the
solemn avowal that we are a Christian nation. We are not! We are a barbarous
people. [113]

On May 4, 1927, Arkansas Negro John Carter was lynched for striking two
white farm women. After hanging Carter in a rural field, a mob riddled the
body with some 300 bullets, jubilantly dragged it in broad daylight through
the streets of Little Rock, soaked the disfigured corpse with gasoline,
and finally burned it on a city street. Marcet Haldeman‑Julius, reporting
on the incident in The Story of a Lynching (1927), was candidly told
by one Little Rock citizen, "When a nigger goes to Chicago or Kansas
and comes back you have to kill him." . . . When you want to describe
a bad nigger down here, you call him a 'Kansas' nigger." [114]

Not surprisingly, the Klan little appreciated the Girard editor's published
condemnations of the Invisible Empire. The publisher received several anonymous
threats on his life, although he was not harmed. Nevertheless, Haldeman‑Julius
refused to remove K. K. K.: The Kreed of the Klansmen (1924) from
publication. In the spring of 1951, J. Edgar Hoover came to Girard and similarly
demanded that Haldeman‑Julius cease publication of a Big Blue Book
entitled The F. B. I.The Basis of an American Police State: The
Alarming Methods of J. Edgar Hoover (1948). Once again, the Kansas editor
refused to submit to intimidation." [115]

A PACIFIST throughout his life, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius hoped that his
Little Blue Books would not only combat the mass ignorance which he considered
characteristic of American society, but he thought they might at the same
time encourage Americans to deal with social problems by means of reason
rather than violence. "Ignorant people are more likely to give rein
to their violent impulses than are intelligent people," he once stated."
[116] The Girard editor, son of a Jewish family that had immigrated to America
to escape the violence of the pogroms, who himself had physically suffered
at the hands of religious intolerance, thought that violence caused only
suffering. He termed capital punishment "an ignorant, cruel, futile,
antiquated method of dealing with the crime of murder." [117] He condemned
the brutality of American prisons, and said of the guards employed by the
Georgia prison system, “The rank and file of prison guards is composed of
illiterate yokels who have received their ethical training from captains
in the Ku Klux Klan. There is not one guard among the fraternity who could
pass an intelligence test prepared for kindergarten pupils.” [118] He advocated
disarmament in international affairs, believing that "disarmed nations
will not fight; for when they have really [172/173] disarmed, they
will have renounced utterly and unreservedly the very idea of fighting as
a means of settling any question." [119] Haldeman-Julius even suggested
that America's independence from the British Crown might have been achieved
by peaceful means, noting,

. . . who can deny that, perhaps more slowly, independence could have been
secured by peaceful political development, responding to the natural growth
of the country and the need of adjusting old arrangements to new issues? Is
Canada, for example, essentially less free than the United States? [120]

WHILE it is true that Haldeman‑Julius
continually condemned what he regarded as the ignorance and irrationality of
American society, it is also true that he frequently did so by employing his
own kind of ignorance and irrationality. One journalist has said of the Girard
publisher that "in his own publications, he fought bunk, sham and baloney
with his own particular brand of baloney, bunk and sham." [121] Although
Haldeman‑Julius repudiated "bunkist" appeals characterized by
violent emotionalism, he himself could resort to virulent name-calling, particularly
when discussing Catholicism and fascism. Indeed, he believed they were one and
the same; German National Socialism and the "Mussolini-Pope regime"
[122] were, in his mind, firmly rooted in Roman Catholic intolerance and persecution.
In view of the publisher's own painful experience with Catholic persecution,
one can at least partially understand why he so often fought religious bigotry
with his own antireligious intolerance. Yet did his Little Blue Books which
so hatefully attacked Roman Catholicism in any way contribute to a general hatred
of Catholics? Haldeman‑Julius could despise a philosophy without necessarily
hating its adherents, yet could all his readers do the same?

In Is Adolf Hitler a Maniac?
(1930), Haldeman‑Julius distorted truth and reported hearsay information
as fact. He declared that the whole of Germany was suffering under Hitler's
rule, and that most Nazis were homosexuals. Although the publisher was a pacifist,
he suggested that violent means might be necessary to remove Hitler from power.
The editor's characterizations of prominent Americans were frequently unfair,
as when he portrayed Herbert Hoover as a deceitful capitalist totally insensitive
to the sufferings of America's unemployed. His judgments were sometimes puzzling,
as when he condemned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People on the grounds that "it pretended to be social and uplifting while
in fact it was strictly political." [123] Although he fought against racial
hatred, he published a Little Blue Book of jokes about American Negroes which
characterized them as both wise and stupid. He did not see this as harmful,
noting in 1928, "A sense of humor will save many a serious situation from
disaster. Then, too, the desire to laugh at ourselves is healthyit will
keep us sane, and at the same time promote the sum total of human happiness."
[124]

In 1919 Emanuel Haldeman‑Julius had launched a crusade for enlightenment,
freedom, and human happiness. He had declared war on Babbitts and bunk,
and some of the most prominent social critics in America had rallied to
his call. Many were themselves authors of Little Blue Books. During the
1920's, the Haldeman‑Julius farm became something of a national cultural
retreat, hosting such personalities as painter Abraham Walkowitz, Clarence
Darrow, Anna Louise Strong, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., opera singers Lawrence
Tibbett and Enrico Caruso, and Jane Addams.

IN 1933 Marcet Haldeman‑Julius sued her husband for separate maintenance,
claiming he had refused "to supply her funds for household expenses."
[125] Although the suit was granted, the couple still lived in the same
house for the next eight years. Marcet died in 1941, and the following year
Haldeman‑Julius married his secretary, Sue Haney. On April 18, 1951,
the Girard publisher was found guilty of federal income tax evasion. Defense
Attorney Douglas Hudson stated that his client was a self‑educated
man having little experience in bookkeeping. [126] Haldeman‑Julius
himself [173/174] claimed that he had "only made honest mistakes."
[127]

The publisher was given a $12,500 fine, six months in prison, and three
years probation. Yet he was unable to serve the sentence, as he drowned
in his swimming pool on July 31, 1951. The coroner ruled the death accidental.

Marcet Haldeman‑Julius once said that of all the literary figures
in history, she thought her husband was most like Voltaire. In his Little
Blue Books, the Kansas publisher continually spoke out against bigotry,
violence, and human suffering. Haldeman-Julius strongly believed in the
freedom of individuals, regardless of their color, creed, or sex. People
had always sought personal freedom, he maintained, because human beings
were happiest when they were free.

According to the publisher's second wife Sue, "Emanuel loved life
and he loved peopleall kinds of people, from his celebrated friends
right down to the big red‑faced milkman who trudged by our farm daily."
[128] Haldeman-Julius was active in the Girard Chamber of Commerce, the
founder of the Girard Kiwanis Club, and a member of the Knife and Fork Club.
He helped Girard Italians pass their naturalization tests by tutoring them
in English, and frequently welcomed visiting college students to his home
with the greeting, "How nice of you to come!" [129] Asked in later
years why he enjoyed life, the Kansas publisher replied:

I find life worth living, because I enjoy good music, great books, beautiful
thoughts of truth and freedom, pleasant home life, exchange of ideas, masterpieces
left by the world's greatest thinkers . . . black bread smeared with homemade
butter, magnificent orchestras, letters dictated by my grandchild . . . honest,
friendly neighbors, brand new calves, newly plowed ground, burning logs that
make the house smell sweet, my wife's lovely garden, the fields mantled in
snow, soft‑voiced old people, laughing children . . . the long yawn
that says it's time to turn in. [130]

At the time Emanuel Haldeman‑Julius [174/175] moved to Girard,
in 1915, there were many critics who viewed the American intellectual scene
with despair. Haldeman‑Julius, nevertheless, remained optimistic,
regarding the provincialism, religious hatred, and racial brutality of American
life as passing phenomena. They were not here to stay, the Kansas publisher
believed, because he did not think the American people really desired that
kind of society. While Haldeman‑Julius did believe that the majority
of Americans were ignorant and that many of them were aggressively bigoted,
he remained convinced that this was a consequence of circumstance rather
than choice. And he hoped that his Little Blue Books, the "Democracy
in Books," would give all Americans, especially the poor, the opportunity
for the kind of educational self‑improvement that would one day enable
them to enjoy fuller lives of individual freedom and personal happiness.
"Freedom was an especially important word to him all his life, and
the Constitution was his bible," the editor's second wife recalled
years after his death. "He believed a well‑informed man was an
asset to his country and valiantly opposed those who would seek to stifle
freedom of speech. . . . " [131] Haldeman‑Julius asked his readers
as early as 1923, "Should workmen who delight in The Autobiography
of Benvenuto Cellini, the poetry of Keats, the plays of Shakespeare,
the essays of Schopenhauer, Bacon and Emerson, inspire fear of the part
they may play in the future of society?" [132]

Although the Kansas publisher thought American society was plagued by Babbitts
and bunk, he never doubted there were many Americans who genuinely wanted
to expand

More than 500,000,000 Little Blue Books in over 6,000 different titles
were printed by the Haldeman‑Julius Press between 1919 and 1951. One
popular category was self‑improvement; other subjects in demand were
literature, political philosophy, and sex education. Haldeman‑Julius
also published the socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, and
other periodicals which he advertised on the back covers of some of the
books. Other covers carried a line drawing of the publisher and the logo,
"Little Blue BooksA University in Print Read the World Over."
[175/176]

their minds. Believing that knowledge was the key to happiness, he earnestly
hoped his Little Blue Books would not only provide mass enlightenment, but
they would also inspire the person whom he affectionately called the “young
American scholar.” The editor had faith that this young scholar, once discovered,
would one day continue his war against hatred, intolerance, and human misery.

Emanuel Haldeman‑Julius was confident of this when he wrote from
Girard in 1928:

Somewhere in America this young man isperhaps waiting and longing for
this opportunity. He may be a young Jew on the East Side in New York City.
He may be a young Negro in Harlem. He may be a farm boy in Kansas or Minnesota.
Or this young scholar may be a girl. . . . And neither sex nor race will bar
the right person from this opportunity. He is waiting somewherethis
young scholar. He will hear and recognize my call. For this call will not
only be spokenit will be publishedand it will go throughout the
country. I have confidence that it will not fail to reach the one for whom
it is intended. Surely, in this great, lively, ambitious America there is
such a potential scholar. Somewhere he will be found. Now unknown, he shall
be greatly known. [133]

[The cover of this issue of Kansas History portrays the cover
of a Haldeman-Julius publication.]

TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 14
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

What Every Girl
Should Know

Margaret H. Sanger

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS

[On the inside cover of this issue:]

THE COVER

The front cover of one of the Little Blue Books published by the Haldeman-Julius
Company, Girard, from 1919 to 1951. More than 500,000,000 of the small volumes
were printed in over 6,000 different titles. See the article on the
Little Blue Books on pages 155-176.

Note: The original format of this article was in two columns, with
the title capitalized. The footnotes have been converted into endnotes.
The photo images on my copy were of too degraded quality to include here.
Captions are included, along with notes in brackets indicating the missing
photos.